Introduction: Spanish Women Writers and Spain’s Civil War

Type:

Book Chapter

Published:

2016

Publisher:

Routledge

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) pitted conservative forces including the army, the Church, the Falange (Fascist party), landowners, and industrial capitalists against the Republic, installed in 1931 and supported by intellectuals, the petite bourgeoisie, many campesinos (farm laborers), and the urban proletariat. The Civil War sparked international interest as it emblematized the increasing division of the West between traditional and revolutionary factions in the wake of the Russian Revolution. It provoked heated passions on both sides, and it soon became an international phenomenon when Germany’s Hitler, siding with the Spanish conservative Nationalist forces, sent the Luftwaffe to strafe Guernica in the Basque Country and other locations; Mussolini sent ground troops. The Russians sent airplanes and matériel to support the Republican effort. The Spanish Civil War inspired a number of literary works that reect the impact of the War on foreign and national writers, thus the label “the poet’s war” (see Hugh D. Ford’s A Poets’ War: British Poets and the Spanish Civil War). Maryse Bertrand de Muñoz’s La Guerre civile espagnole et la littérature française and Katharine Bail Hoskins’s Today the Struggle: Literature and Politics in England during the Spanish Civil War chronicle French and English literary representations of the Spanish Civil War. Of the books that include Spanish authors, few mention Spanish women writers. The nearly 100 pages of Marilyn Rosenthal’s Poetry of…

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